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Chapter 10 - Out of AfricaOne morning the conference sessions brought a brutal surprise that interrupted the gentle world that Ushi and I had drifted into. It came in the form of a speech. The speech affected the conference like an exploding bomb. A frail, dark-skinned gentleman appeared on the platform as the first speaker of the day. He wasn't an imposing preacher that thundered as he spoke. In fact, he almost disappeared behind the speaker's platform and had a quiet little voice. There should have been a footstool provided for him. The man introduced himself as Dr. H. N. Rembard, a British medical doctor living in Africa, where he had worked for the World Health Organization for twelve years until he resigned a couple of years past. "There have been times when Africa was considered a rich continent," he began his speech, "and then the new times began when its riches were being exploited by empires that raped the continent and when in the night of that raping a great famine began to strike the land. And after this came our time, the time when Africa began to teeter at the brink of total collapse. We are now seeing the beginning of the end of civilization in Africa." He talked bluntly. He talked about a biological holocaust in the making. He talked about humanity having no compassion and no feeling for one-another as human beings. Without actually saying it, the man laid the blame for Africa's tragedy on the world's big monetary institutions that were squeezing a hundred times more out of Africa through financial looting operations than charitable aid was flowing in. His charge of 'intentional murder on a vast scale' send shivers down my spine. He said the term, genocide, had become too soft a term to describe the crime, and suggested that it was used hide the real dimension. Everyone sat up and listened in stunned silence. "How is this possible?" he asked. But he asked as one who already knew the answer. "How is it that humanity doesn't care?" he said. "How is it possible that humanity remains silent in the face of the tragedies that are being unleashed in Africa at this very moment?" He paused again. "The answer is easy," he said. "They keyword is isolation." He said that Africa had been isolated from the world by vilification and lies by which the individual nations of Africa had become isolated from one-another and coerced into wars based on more lies that opened the doors to countless forms of ethnic vilification and ethnic 'cleansing.' He said there were over 25 military conflicts raging in Africa at any given time in which people's lives were torn apart. "In this extensive, artificially created isolation, the fabric of the nations became destroyed," he said. "The nations were destroyed economically, socially, morally, and weakened biologically. Evidently the starting factor for all this destruction of the humanity in Africa was the war of isolation that was imposed upon it," he added. "The people became isolated even from their own humanity." As he spoke, Anton came to mind. I made a point of observing her reaction with this thought in mind, rather than looking at the speaker. The connection didn't seem to have been made by her in which she might have seen her own self-isolation. I saw no smiles on her face that indicated that a light had dawned. She just sat there and listened. She reacted to some of the ugly details. I could see pain in her face, but that was all that she reacted to. The man from Africa said that when he left the World Health Organization, epidemics of cholera, malaria, hepatitis B, AIDS, Sleeping Sickness, measles, and Yellow Fever had broken out in Africa. "Cholera epidemics were already reported in 90 countries worldwide," he said, "with 22 of them located in Africa. Malaria was even worse. There had been an estimated 160 million active cases in Africa alone since the population could no longer protect itself, because the American ban of the DDT insecticide now prevented the protective process that had once nearly eradicated malaria. The official excuse for the ban was that the tsetse fly, which carries the malaria parasite, should not be eradicated, but be granted the same right to live and thrive as any other beast." || - page index - || - chapter index - || - Exit - ||
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